G400 TurboICD miniGL announced!

[Frank]

Yes, I think I know what you mean, but its not a good idea to unplug the monitor from the G400 and then plug it into the V2's while the computer is running. Have you unplugged/plugged monitors into cards while the system is online?
Unless you mean to have the monitor plugged into the voodoo2's (to observe V2 perf) before startup.....but then you will be looking at a blank screen from the non existing 2D output from the V2. Then it is not possible to negotiate within windows cos you wont see it. So I wouldn't be able to start Q2.
umm..does that make any sense?
Regards,
Frank.

[LAMFDTK]

1. Quake 3 does not use a "miniplug" it needs an ICD. (this is in 3DFX) If you have a OPGL driver in you Q3 folder you are "hacking the program. I am in awe of your results Frank to say the least! 30 FPS@1600 32 bit? cool ! keep posting because I have never seen anything like this anywhere. Really...

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PIII-450, 128 HDSRAM, Asus P3BF, G400/32, SBLive!, Nokia 447Xi 17",

[Frank]

Jesus, you make me feel like I am full of shit.
Ummm...to me it is quite playable at that res using my G400.
Let me do a timedemo benchmark before my post sounds like my system is flying. It might turn out that I am playing at 20fps.
We are talking about Q2 not Q3.
BRB.

[Frank]

Hello Lamfdtk,
I just played some Q2 at 1600x1200x32 and its certainly playable to me (however speed gods may disagree). Running demomap demo1.dm2 results in 31fps.
I now realize you were under the impression that I was talking about Q3. Negative. No way. Heh. I do not get that performance. Playing Q3 at 'High Quality' setting and ONLY adjusting the resolution to 1600x1200 results in uncomfortable game play. But at that setting and 1024 res is very comfortable to me(again thats subjectice). A demo q3demo1 at 1600 results in 16fps and at 1024 results in 33fps.
Hoping that clarifies things.

"Quake 3 does not use a "miniplug" it needs an ICD"

Well, when I installed the vd2gl.exe for my creative v2's(from creatives site), all this install does is search your hard drives for games and installs the OpenGL32.dll driver into those game directories AND NOT in the windows/system directory. So if I start Q3, the 'Driver Info' will indicate that the 'Vendor' is CreativeLabs and the 'Renderer' is 3dfx Glide3X for Voodoo2. Which incidently allows me to play at 1600x1200 having selected 32bit colour depth and 32bit texture format but the 'Pixel Format' indicates that color 16bits Z 16bits and Stencil 0bits. Dunno.
If I want to use the G400ICD.dll in my windows/system folder, I must change the installed OpenGL32.dll in the Q3 dir to OpenGL32.bak. Then Q3 indicates the 'Vendor' as Matrox Graphics, the 'Renderer' as Matrox G400.
This is from their readme.txt

"================================================= ===
What is the Creative OpenGL Mini-Driver ?
================================================== ==
The OpenGL Driver is a specially tuned subset of
OpenGL designed to run a selected set of OpenGL
games at their peak performance and image quality.

A normal OpenGL Driver delivered by the Chip
Manufacturer supports ALL OpenGL functions (over
400 seperate functions). This level of
functionality constitutes a validated Driver (called
an ICD) and can be officially "approved" by
Microsoft. The GOOD news is this level of
functionallity will allow any software product that
requires OpenGL to function. The BAD news is,
unfortunately, to reach this level of capability,
the overall performance of the Driver will suffer.

What is provided to you in this release is a
performance enhanced version of the OpenGL Driver
designed to work only with the Quake Engine
products. Since the Quake Engine only uses a subset
of OpenGL (less than 100 functions), a dedicated
Driver has been developed and optimized for these
functions."

Hope that clarifies some more.
Regards,
Frank.

[Frank]

Someone else wrote:

"that's a screw-up in 3dfx's alleged new "openGl ICD".
only the text overlay and HUD is actually changed (you'll notice they get smaller). the game still runs in the same old resolutions"


By examining snapshots of Q2 using Hypersnap DX, I discovered my conclusion.
From 640x480 up to 1024x768, the snapshop pictures got progressively larger. At 1152x864, 1280x960 and 1600x1200 they are all the same size as the 1024x768 shot.
I guess this concludes the issue.
It had me baffled for a while.
Thanks for everyones help.
Frank.